I've decided to f-lock all posts related to my own fic and art (for this reason, which is also locked for added transparency!). If you'd like to get updates on my fanstuff via here, please comment to be added.

New post by me on the OTW's main blog, about the importance of open access for fan studies and what I think open access really means. It also includes a small teaser for an upcoming project that I and a few other OTW folks have been hammering away at for months. (Why yes, I am kind of preoccupied with this open access thing.)

I'm preparing to move back to Belgium in a couple of months, and one of the things that needs to be sorted out is what the best data plans for smartphones are over there. It's been two years and everything is different. To my great annoyance, Belgium still hasn't invented the unlimited data plan; the most I can get per month is 2 gig, which is just low enough to make me worry about overshooting it and paying an arm and a leg for using an extra 30 megabytes or something. (My first experience with this came a few years ago when I visited my grandmother in the hospital. I decided to download her favorite CD from iTunes on the spot so she'd have some music to listen to. Grandma was successfully cheered up for a while, but apparently I'd overshot my monthly data allowance already, and my good deed turned up on my mobile bill to the tune of 80 euros a few weeks later.)

Remember Aaron Swartz, the information freedom activist who set off a broad online discussion about academic databases in 2011 when he downloaded about four million articles from JSTOR to make a point about how knowledge shouldn't be locked away from the public?

Swartz never put those four million articles online anywhere, or did anything else with them besides downloading, but the way he downloaded them (edit: better link) was in violation of JSTOR's terms of service. JSTOR recognized that they were dealing with an activist doing a stunt, not some kind of pirate who wanted to deny them income; they declined to press charges. However, a federal prosecutor decided to make an example of Swartz and pursued him relentlessly, threatening to slap him with a million-dollar fine and up to thirty-five years in jail. With the upcoming trial looming over him, Swartz hanged himself on January 11 at the age of 26.

We often point to examples of incidents that show how broken copyright law is, but this is just too enraging for words. Karl Fogel at QuestionCopyright.org and Lawrence Lessig say best exactly how shameful the prosecutor's behavior was, regardless of whether or not Swartz' actions were wrong (they differ on that). This guy did not deserve what he was being threatened with. The people who wasted public money hounding him to his death instead of dealing with actual crimes should be too ashamed to ever look in the mirror again.This entry was originally posted at http://unjapanologist.dreamwidth.org/67297.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

The article is plenty strange and sad in and of itself; anyone who can write with a straight face that "A corporate/government financial alliance is replacing scholarly publication once organized and run by scientists and academics" has a very, very idealistic view of the sort of traditional academic publishing that open access is trying to revolutionize.

And then comes this comparison:

Similar changes are eroding literary publication as direct electronic publication by authors on the Internet has led to erotic and reportedly pornographic works like Fifty Shades of Grey and spinoffs sweeping bestsellers lists for months. The issue is not whether erotica or pornography is or should be popular; rather, one wonders what literary work might have filled those slots on the bestsellers lists if traditional mechanisms of editor-evaluated publication had been applied, which consider more than simply the potential popularity of a work in deciding what to publish.

One wonders indeed.

This man lives in a very strange reality. But I love, love, love the idea of equating open access with 50 Shades! It means that advocating for open publication of my research is just like polluting my pure academic environment with BDSM porn. I feel totally all right with conceptualizing my work in that way. Maybe I should make some mugs and t-shirts for other open access-loving fan studies people.This entry was originally posted at http://unjapanologist.dreamwidth.org/65410.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

The European Fandom & Fan Studies Conference took place on November 10, 2012 at the University of Amsterdam. It was a relatively small one-day conference, but great in terms of content and people present. I was especially pleased to see so many researchers going beyond English-language online fandoms, tackling offline fan activities or doing comparative studies with other online fandoms that communicate in different languages. There was also a strong emphasis on how fans interact with media industries and deal with fannish activities that involve money, which is one of my favorite topics. I heard a ton of interesting ideas, and others clearly did too.

There were a couple of participants tweeting at least semi-regularly, and I'm surprised at how much of what happened at the conference comes across pretty well by looking at the tweets. With just a handful of Twitter-happy attendees plus Storify, it's very easy to leave a permanent record of the goings-on at any conference for anyone who wants or needs to see what was said there.

It's not a perfect system. The technology has to work, obviously; I attend plenty of conferences were wifi is still not assumed to be necessary, and even at this one, the network was a bit troublesome. Conferences with parallel panels also need at least a small group to cover everything more or less thoroughly. There were a couple of presentations during which all the really active tweeters happened to be in a different room, or temporarily comatose because of jetlag in my case, and these presentations are conspicuously absent from the timeline. Perhaps conferences should make a bigger deal out of live-tweeting to encourage more people to pick up the slack? And designate a conference historian to make the Storify later on.

At the European Fandom & Fan Studies Conference at the University of Amsterdam right now. The one-day conference just started and is being livetweeted with the hashtag #eurofandom. Drop in if you're interested! (No conference program online, alas.)

I'm just attending, not presenting, so I can spend all free mental time learning and tweeting and enjoying jetlag. Bliss.
This entry was originally posted at http://unjapanologist.dreamwidth.org/64666.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Yes, you get what you deserve when you ego-google. But since I'm building a career and all that, I like to check what pops up first when a grant committee or someone I might want to collaborate with searches for my name.